Coming to Terms with Being Poor
By Xinpeng Gao
Amonth ago, I saw a tweet featuring a picture of a brownstone in New York City with the caption along the lines of “If you ever want to hate yourself, just take a walk around Greenwich Village. You’ll dream that you’ll have a beautiful family in these Brownstones and realize that will never happen to you”.
A month later, this thought has not escaped my head, unlike the thousands of tweets, reels, and other social slop I hastily glance at. When I lived in Brooklyn, taking a walk was what usually distracted me from the daily stressors of life. Did I just fail a test with heavy weight towards my grade? Just received a (well-deserved) reality check on an awaiting decision? Minutes later, my foot was out the door and I was breezing through big crowds. I kept my eyes down, making sure I didn’t accidentally step in a puddle or get hit by one of those folding carts grandmas use to carry their groceries. Sure, I was being a jerk, taking up space in an already crowded area—sometimes having to apologize because I bumped into a small child. But the sense of similar social standing was what calmed me down as I watched people juggle their day-to-day errands despite being middle-class.
“Did I really enjoy taking tremendous risk where the strenuous hours I poured sweat working towards could be nuked and drop to $0?”
What would it be like to live on the west side of Manhattan instead? What if I were struggling in life and decided to take a walk through the village where people lived in the most picturesque and vicarious ways? To your left is a literal movie set featuring actors who feign tears and gloom only on command, and are immediately pampered at the finest restaurants after work. When you look to your right, you see a group of girls smiling after a pilates session that is double the cost of my monthly gym membership, holding a $10 matcha latte in their hands. I’m not sure how it would make you feel, but personal-
ly, I would be deeply depressed if I saw people living this way. Walking through an environment where everyone lives a lavish lifestyle would be one of the gravest stressors in my life, rather than something I once looked forward to.
Initially, when I read that tweet, I froze for a few seconds before showing it to my roommate, telling him how depressing it is that this lifestyle described is never going to come for us. I thought of all the times that I attempted to get “rich.” The conventional and sound financial advice for one to get rich is to work a job, send a portion of your income to your Roth IRA so you can finally pull out your investments when you turn 65, and hopefully, you’ll have enough money to retire. The financial advice that many tout on social media is to download Robinhood or find a crypto exchange and start trading options or perpetuals respectively.
“The average graduate from Binghamton makes about $73,768 a year–this is probably what I will make in five years.”
I will admit that I have tried the financial advice that many tout on social media more than the former. In retrospect, that was immature. All I was doing was living vicariously, chasing a dream that was never going to happen. As many say, “no crying in the casino”—did I really enjoy taking tremendous risk where the strenuous hours I poured sweat working towards could be nuked and drop to $0?
I turn eighteen in a few days, and I think this is one of the lessons you learn as you grow older. The average graduate from Binghamton makes about $73,768 a year–this is probably what I will make in five years, perhaps even $0 a year if the job market remains stagnant. Reader, you may think that what I’m about to say is a rationalization from Freud’s list of defense mechanisms, but I’ll say it anyway: It’s okay to be poor and middle class. It’s not that bad—perhaps even ideal.
Notes from the Abolished Metropolis
The smell hit first. A damp, sweet rot—half weed smoke, half decomposing infrastructure—that clung to your clothes like regret. Everything had changed. The rats too. They no longer scurried; they commuted—dragging pizza slices like Roman chariots and fighting over falafel wrappers beside the corpse of an electric Citi Bike. Whole colonies lived in the abandoned Whole Foods, now the People’s Sustainable Mausoleum for Late-Stage Capitalism. Half the skyscrapers were dark because the grid had “decentralized.” Battery-powered fires flickered in the windows of old startups, like ghosts of innovation haunting failed IPOs. The East River shimmered with a greasy rainbow film of bio-waste and antidepressant runoff. Trash mounds sighed in the wind, occasionally erupting as raccoons fought pigeons over compostable takeout labeled “Equity Bowl.” Ordering food required entering your privilege score before seeing restaurants. But that wasn’t the last straw. Not the fires. Not the rats. Not even when rent was “abolished” (landlords to be “re-educated in post-property harmony”). The last straw came when my local bodega turned into a “mutual-aid harm-reduction safe space,” where people were mainlining fentanyl beside a broken Mr. Softee truck labeled “Community Health Unit #4.” That’s when I knew I had to leave New York City.
“Sirens had been replaced by ‘non-coercive alert tones’—gentle harp chimes that played every time someone got stabbed.”
Ever since Comrade Zohran Mamdani took office, life had gotten… difficult. Every streetlight now ran on “community consensus,” flickering to indicate whenever someone within its vicinity felt oppressed. Driving was suicide. The asphalt had liquefied under turf wars between the Department of Infrastructure Reparations and the Ministry of Historical Pavement Justice. One pothole had its own ZIP code. You couldn’t take the subway—it was a “free-range” shelter for “the unhoused and unjudged.” The trains ran occasionally as mobile rave units playing lo-fi remixes of the mayor’s speeches. There were no “criminals,” only “justice-involved citizens.” Protests erupted whenever someone’s WiFi dropped. Push notifications arrived like prophecies: “Midtown on fire again, this time for justice!” Billboards flickered between alerts and morale messages: “CRIME IS A CONSTRUCT. THE CITY IS THRIVING. ONLY THE PRIVILEGED FEAR FOR THEIR LIVES.” EquityVision, the last TV station, played one looping program—“New York Never Looked Better”—footage from 2013 with cars cropped out and Comrade Mamdani’s face superimposed on Michael Bloomberg’s. So I packed three cans of soup, my passport, and an old, tattered blanket, and started walking north.
Times Square looked like a fallen empire. Half the billboards
By Comson Cao
dark, the rest flickering propaganda: “VIOLENCE IS DOWN. BELIEVE HARDER.” Below them, thousands camped in nylon tents, charging phones on solar panels made from old street signs. A man wearing a traffic cone offered me a “free-speech license” for ten dollars. Sirens had been replaced by “non-coercive alert tones”—gentle harp chimes that played every time someone got stabbed. By the Bronx, my legs were shaking. Every few blocks, screens blared, “HOUSING IS A HUMAN RIGHT. TRUST YOUR GOVERNMENT. YOU ARE SAFE.” That last one glitched halfway through Mamdani’s smile.
“I emerged into a wasteland of burned-out Teslas, abandoned scooters, and skeletal billboards promising ‘resilient futures.’”
At one point, I stumbled into what used to be a Dunkin’ Donuts. The sign now read “DU N.” Inside, lights flickered over shelves of empty cups and a fridge full of oat milk. Behind the counter stood a man in a Venezuelan-flag apron and a red cap. “Coffee,” I croaked. “¿Qué?” “Coffee.” I mimed a sip. He unleashed a stream of Spanish. We stared at each other, defeated. Then he nodded, disappeared into the back, and returned with a cup of brown sludge smelling like gasoline and molasses. I took a sip. It burned. It buzzed. It wasn’t coffee. He smiled proudly. I gave a thumbs-up and backed out before my tongue dissolved. By dusk, I reached the city limits, or rather, what was left of them. The bridges had been dismantled for “equitable construction.” Drones patrolled the exits, scanning for escape intent. I crawled through a half-collapsed tunnel beneath an old toll plaza, emerging into a wasteland of burned-out Teslas, abandoned scooters, and skeletal billboards promising “resilient futures.” Then I saw it—the wall. A barricade of Teslas, golf carts, and RVs welded together, topped with motion sensors and barbed wire made of Christmas lights. Painted across it in careful suburban cursive: “PULL YOURSELF UP BY YOUR BOOTSTRAPS! LET THEM LEARN THEIR LESSON! THE RED WAVE IS COMING!” Behind the barricade, retirees sipped chardonnay on manicured lawns, watching through binoculars like it was live theater. I called out for help. One man raised a glass. “You voted for this!” “I didn’t!” He shrugged. “Someone did. Actions have consequences.” Then he went back to his steak tips. I turned around, staring at the orange, smoky glow behind me. Somewhere in the distance, Comrade Mamdani’s voice boomed through a megaphone: “Tomorrow begins our next phase: the complete decolonization and abolition of whiteness!” Applause followed—thousands of hands clapping in unison, or maybe just another building collapsing. That night, I slept beneath an overturned food truck. Around midnight, the rats came. They carried tiny placards now, slogans painted in red Sharpie. One climbed onto my chest, twitched its whiskers, and squeaked: “You can’t escape progress.”
